When I was 6 or 7 years old growing up in Moscow, some 30 years before the experience made its way into the consciousness of my journey, I liked to "play secrets". As an only child I had to occupy myself somehow and that game was as good as any because I could easily do it on my own. It involved rappers for chocolates. The ones that you've managed to consume of course! The better chocolates - the more intricate the rappers were. The best were the ones with the picture in the middle < it could even be a tiny replica of some famous Russian masterpiece hanging at Tretyakov Gallery> and the silver lining. After spending hours on folding them, still smelling of chocolate, just right, completed with the silver design of the lining leaf, you had to hunt for another necessary element of a "secret". That would be a piece of glass. The beer bottled ones, amber in color were the most magical. Then you had to bury the folded rapper with the glass on top in the shallow grave of the playground's dirt. That was a "secret". The magic happened when the young "artist", on all fours and with her nose close to the ground, started to push the dirt away with her single finger in a slow little circular motion, clearing the tiny window of colored glass.... What a transformation! In the first shock of discovery it takes you a while to comprehend what you were actually seeing.....Then it sinks in: a mystery of familiar....And the feeling! Of wonder, of revelation. I think that all my life I am chasing that feeling - the mystery to be discovered. That simultaneous shift of reality, the recognition of magic

Born in 1961 Moscow, Russia1997 MFA Moscow State University of Cinematography (VGIK)